One week of KDE

Last week, I swtiched back from GNOME to KDE for one week. I used KDE 3.5.9, not 4.0.2 because I think that one will very probably not be mature enough for my needs.

What is nice in KDE, is that it is often much more advanced than GNOME functionality wise. For example, Kopete has much better MSN support than Pidgin: it supports sending and receiving of away/personal messages, there’s webcam support,… The KDE notifications framework is a great way to fine tune all kinds of different notifications to events, such as sounds, passive pop-up notifications, etc,… K3b is by far the best Free CD burner application, while Amarok is still unrivaled in its combination of power and GUI attractiveness and GNOME’s F-Spot does not even have half of Digikam’s features. KDE’s memory usage also felt better than GNOME. My 1 GB system seemed to swap less than in GNOME, running comparable programs.

The big problem with KDE however, still are the random crashes and various things which do not work as expected. In one week of time, I experienced two random Kontact/KMail crashes. GWenview/nspluginviewer is crashing when entering a directory with movies if you have mplayerplug-in installed. KMail sometimes gives new mail notifications for old, unread e-mail and changing the file associations for MIME types, does not always seem to work correctly, especially when using the right click – Open With menu, and selecting the option to always use the selected application in the future. KDE does not support mounting LUKS encrpyted file systems and the fact that you have to explicitly open a removable device first in Konqueror in order to have it mounted, can be annoying at times.

So I am back to GNOME again now. While it has generally less features than KDE, the features that are there, generally work very reliably, which is not always the case in KDE. Unfortunately, I am afraid that the Linux desktop will only really start taking of if there’s a desktop which can nicely combine stability, features and ease of use, which is not yet the case to my feeling. I am curious to see what KDE 4 will bring in the future. Based on Mutt’s motto, for now I dare to conclude: all desktops suck, GNOME just sucks slightly less.

I use both KDE and GNOME regularly and do not experience any of the problems mentioned in your blog. Also, it is possible to automount removable devices in KDE, without using Konqueror to open them first. In my case, browsing samba shares under KDE is more reliable than under GNOME. It took me almost a year of using both KDE and GNOME to finally decide which of the two I prefer (KDE, as it happens), and I think a lot of it comes down to one’s personal experience on the specific platform(s) one is using them on and one’s personal preference for the look and feel of the GUI, applets and applications.

Yes,
that exactly describes the current Linux reality. KDE is much more featured, but much more bugged. It’s not true in all case… Tracker, Strigi… All that things zealots used to compare Linux’s features with Apple! Depending on configuration Evolution is really buggy too… Well, I love and use Linux, but disinformation is really a problem… Does not help all of those who try to promote efficiently Linux. Just an example: SoundJuicer tags correctly with new Ubuntu Hardy… That just means that previously, a program that does not tag correctly was promoted… We are in 2007 !!!

In my KDE 3.5.8 and.9 (Lenny and Gutsy), I also don’t have any of these problems. I work with these desktops all workday, and enough in my free time. Rock solid. I’ve not used the KDE4 series much yet, however. It’s young. But I cannot *work* to Gnome. Now, time to read about this guy who can: http://lexlocilinux.blogspot.com/2008/03/thanks-ubuntu.html

Well, in that case, you could say that it still looks worse for GNOME then: strictly speaking GNOME does not even contain an instant messaging and photo organizer, so it still has even less features than what I was assuming…

But in the end it does not matter: end users do not care at all about what is officially part of the GNOME desktop, but care about what is installed by default. AFAIK all important distros ship Pidgin and F-Spot by default in GNOME. Let’s hope Empathy will be in shape soon to become a better and more feature complete IM app for end users than Pidgin currently is. In any case, it’s somewhere on my TODO list to compile the latest Empathy stuff soon, in order to take a look at it :-)